Plot
The inept, somewhat slow-witted U.S. senator Melvin G. Ashton wants to run for President of the United States. His eager publicist, Lew Gibson, encourages him with various attention-gaining stunts, disappointing his girlfriend Poppy McNaughton, a reporter.
Political boss Fred Houlihan strongly urges Ashton to abandon his campaign. Ashton, however, has been secretly keeping a diary for decades in which he has recorded the various political ploys and sins of Houlihan and other politicians.
The beautiful Valerie Shepherd joins the campaign and Lew takes a liking to her. Poppy breaks up with him. During a political rally at Madison Square Garden, the diary is stolen. Valerie appears to be working for a political foe of Ashton's who persuaded her to infiltrate the campaign and steal the diary.
Ashton has lost his leverage and is willing to step aside, but only if Houlihan helps him find a new source of income. Seen as incapable of doing anything else, Ashton is offered a position as commissioner of a sports league, a job that pays twice as much as being a senator did.
The diary is retrieved by Lew and could return Ashton to the political stage. But a guilty conscience gets the better of him. He gives the diary to Poppy, who publishes it. That's the end for everyone politically, including Ashton. He moves to a South Seas Island, where his new ambition is to become king.
Read more about this topic: The Senator Was Indiscreet
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
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